Archive for June, 2008

You know, I’ve noticed a kind of trend in the collectible knife industry. There are, as you can probably imagine, several niche specific trademark weapon themes.

For instance, Every one will have, at one point or another, run onto the “Movie” themed blade, even if, as I have mentioned in previous posts, there was absolutely no call for a blade in the movie. In fact there are even some movies whose protagonists would never have touched a blade with a 100 foot, hyperspace extended, unobtanium pole, who still somehow manage to have swords made in their name. But I’m ranting now…

Anyway, other niche styles are the mean and practical (or at least practical looking ) fighting blades, which tend to be “Black Ronin/Ninja” styled. And then you have the more elegant and stylish types of “Fantasy” and hybrid fantasy/classical blades tend to follow the “Dragon” school of themed blade design.

Today we have an example of the “Crazy Fantasy blades inspired of nature” school of design, in which resides many of the most funky, impractical, wonky, and generally unusable blade designs, intended purely to showcase… Well, I guess you could call it “art” since that’s all it’s good for, but are basically freaky blades with a serious biomech fetish… Think reptiles, arachnids and H.R. Gieger…

One of the most proliferous vaults in the hallowed halls of the biomech school of blade aesthetics is that of the arachnophile designer. Here we find all manner of freaky spider, scorpion, Horders/Spinets and even dragon scorpakes/snakions, themed fantasy blades, (who knew such things existed??!) most with absolutely impossible ergonomics, that exist only for the purpose of art for arts sake.

Today’s weapon is yet another dubious chip off the infamous Blade Legged Spider block, this time from the warped mind of Tom Anderson, and sporting perhaps the most futile attempt (evar!), at appearing practical:

Yes, with a cool hip name like Turantula, who could possibly fault this… thing? I dunno. But I do know there has to be a reason other than art in order to find practical fault with things like this, and frankly not being the particularly artsy type… I’m at a loss…

Soo… We start with the basics. A description. What we have here is a black, ovoid carapace looking thing, with a push dagger style grip attached to the top of it, and a set of 8 blades riveted to sockets arranged around the periphery of the carapace to form the legs of a spider.

OK, yes. This would do some damage if used push dagger style. But seriously, you can’t exactly hide something like this in your boot, like a push dagger. At best, you could grab it from the neato little spider web wall mount that it comes with and threaten a burglar with it. Who would promptly laugh and proceed to stab you to death for the insult.

Ok, maybe I’m not being fair. Truth is, I actually like to design of the leg blades. And the T grip is not bad either. This isn’t how I’d put it all together, but from an artistic standpoint I like the overall idea, and the strategically designed wall mount is a nice touch. The thing is that It’s just so blatantly useless (apart from being an admittedly cool conversation piece on the wall) that it screams to be picked on…

So I ran across this interesting little blade a while back, just haven’t had the time to post about it. Fortunately, I got this afternoon off, so here is:

The Shapely Enigma

Sadly, I have not been able to find any more info about this blade, or better pictures, for that matter, so this rather poor one will have to do, but as you can see, this is a rather shapely enigma indeed…

It looks to me like an over sized kerambit with an ornately finished hilt. The seductively curving blade is finished in a faux damascus pattern, probably acid etched, judging from the clean look of the very small edge ground into the inside curve of the blade.

The ricasso of this knife is rather eloquently punctuated with a number of reverse hooks cut out of the spine with an unusual pattern ending in a forward facing spine, looking almost like a talon or claw, cut out on the edge side of the ricasso.

The guard is another aesthetic touch I found quite pleasing, consisting of a similar, upward pointing talon on the front, and a rearward pointing one on the back. In addition, the forward spine seems to flow down and incorporate itself into the design of the grip.

The black textured grip, incorporating an integrated sub hilt for added control, does a good job of accentuating the rest of the hilt, with an almost dragon scale like appearance that flows naturally into the beak/talon patterned pommel. Now normally this level of detail in the pommel puts me off, but somewhow in this blade it just seems to add to it’s elegance.

So yeah… I’m liking this blade. Not sure what it is… Perhaps it’s subtle organic shape just appeals to my base instincts… But I just had to take a moment to write about it.

And now it’s back to the grind for me… Stay tuned… I’m still around… Just slacking on my posting a bit… LOL

Well, If you haven’t noticed, my posting has been a little sporadic lately. Been overwhelmed with a lot of different things. And sadly, it does not appear that there is an end to the madness in sight. So, unfortunately, my blogging musty take a back seat for a while.

I will still continue to blog, just a little less often. I hope you all don’t mind will hanging out for a bit. It will get better eventually, but i can’t say when. I guess I’m getting slow in my old age… 😀

For those not totally and uncompromisingly nerdy, Yes. The title of this post is relevant (scientifically, any way) to the blade we’ll be looking at today… 😛

Scorpion Fantasy Knife

I’m just going to assume at this point that the average reader of this blog is intelligent enough to have figured out that Pandinus Imperator is the scientific name of the venerable Black Emperor Scorpion, AKA the African Emperor Scorpion. throwing “Cave”, the latin for “beware” in front should (in theory) translate to “Beware the Black Emperior Scorpion…” Neat huh? What? Hey, I thought it was cool… Whatever…

Bah humbug. Well I’m also going to assume you understand why I chose this particular title. Even though technically, it’s misleading, as the Black Emperor Scorpion is one of the most benevolent Emperors around, and is in fact, the scorpion of choice for those who keep them as pets… But If not, I apologise, but you will need to send me $50 in US currency, in order to discover the oh, so very intriguing reasons… 😛

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I must admit to being a little surprised by the outstanding basic honesty of whoever named this blade. Unlike much of the usual black ronin samurai ninja fare i come across, “Scorpion Fantasy Knife” is comparatively simple, perhaps a little too simple. But it is straight to the point, and does not pretend to be anything it’s not. In fact they could have just gotten away with something as simple as “Black Scorpion dagger/blade” and not have sounded pretentious… But I’m just nitpicking here…

But names, both scientific and fantasy, aside, I must say I love the contours of the blade. Curves that go on for days. The entire blade profile consist of nothing but arcs of varying radii intersecting each other. Eve n the finger guard is an uninterrupted continuation of the bottom most blade arc. Just wickedly sweet looking IMHO. It’s a little bit bowie, a little bit Swords of Chaos, and all in beautiful black.

Now the hilt, weeeelll… that’s a mixed bag. As usual the designer has opted to go with the form over function school and has created a designer piece that has a rather poor grip. Too short, too much curve, all show, little go. Not that the idea wasn’t a good one. From an aesthetic perspective, they have captured the tail of the scorpion quite well. Even down the that excellently formed and placed stinger pommel.

I guess I should stop trying to evaluate artsy blades from the standpoint of practical functionality. I do like it’s looks. It’s just that the whole lack of functionality can usually be avoided without sacrificing the aesthetics. But it seems like they don’t even try. It’s a crying shame I tell ya. A crying shame…

An interesting piece of work is it not? Kinda looks like a hybrid cross between an old fashioned wood saw and a dagger. But it’s a rather cool piece nonetheless, though it is a rather specialized weapon.

There was a period in medieval history, where European deuelers/sword fighters fought with two weapons. In The strong hand they wielded a long heavier weapon, usually a rapier or similar sword, which was used primarily for attack. The second weapon, called a Main Gauche, was a smaller, lighter, and therefore much quicker weapon, whose speed advantage was used to parry attacks made by the opponents main weapon.

Now at some point during this period, some bright enterprising spark realized that the best defense was to eliminate your opponents offense. Pretty smart thinking if you ask me. Anyway since they already had a tool that was conveniently always in a position to trap the opponents blade, they thought, why not take advantage of that, and parry an incoming blow from your opponents sword with not just a dagger, but a sword breaking tool… Brilliant!

And thus the sword breaker was born. Now the sword breaker is not just a Main Gauche with a number of large slots worked into the spine of the blade. These were constructed of much thicker, heavier steel. They needed the added strength because of their rather unique design characteristics:

As you can see, a lot of material has been taken out of the spine for the purpose of making large slots, which is where the sword breaking is supposed to take place. The idea being that when a strike came in from your opponents blade, you would let it slide into one of these slots. Then, a quick flick of the wrist/jerk of the arm, and SNAP! Your foes blade cries mama and buckles under the pressure of the dueling equivalent of an armbar… Except you break the arm… Evil, I tell you… EVIL… But brilliant!

Now in reality it probably wasn’t so easy, and it probably took a lot of skill to pull something like that off, but the idea is certainly a cool one… But back to the blade. Now In a regular blade these big slots would introduce a lot of weakness into the blade, making it easier to break. But seeing as the idea was for this to be a breaker, and not a breakee, these blades are made thicker and stronger, and were just overall put together of tougher stuff, simply not to be messed with…

I’d really hate to be the guy that had his sword broken during a duel with one of the underhanded hyenas that would carry something like this around… Hmmm… You also gotta wonder how horrific a stabbing weapon this would be. Kinda looks like the kind of thing a Klingon might use…